PHILADELPHIA — Pennsylvania and its critical elections are back in the national spotlight this week.
President Joe Biden spoke in Wilkes-Barre on Tuesday, he’s coming to Philadelphia on Thursday, and is heading to Pittsburgh for the city’s Labor Day parade Monday. In between, former President Donald Trump is rallying Saturday in Wilkes-Barre with GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano and Senate nominee Mehmet Oz.
That’s four visits by the current and past president in seven days.
The dueling events again showcase the importance of Pennsylvania’s 2022 elections. The outcomes of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate and House races could help decide control of Congress, which carries with it the fate of Biden’s agenda. The contests for governor and control of the state legislature could set the course for laws on abortion, voting, and more.
“Who wins the Pennsylvania Senate seat has a good shot of controlling the Senate. Who carries Pennsylvania in 2024 has a good shot of being the president,” said J.J. Balaban, a Philadelphia-based Democratic strategist.
The twin visits to Wilkes-Barre, meanwhile, highlight northeastern Pennsylvania’s significance for both Biden and Trump as a key battleground region within a battleground state.
Mastriano and Oz are both scheduled to appear at Trump’s event, hoping to channel his popularity with Republican voters. But while Biden and Trump may each rally their partisan supporters, their visits also point to questions about whether either man will help — or hinder — their parties.
“I don’t really see either of them as assets at this point,” said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
For months, Biden has appeared to be a weight on his party, stuck on the path that brings most presidents stinging losses in their first midterm elections.
But the last few weeks have Democrats feeling, if not great about Biden, at least less bad. Inflation cooled in July. He secured a major bill to lower prescription-drug prices and invest billions in green energy, as well as a bipartisan measure to address gun violence, which he touted Tuesday in Wilkes-Barre. He gave out college debt relief, and his poll numbers have ticked upward.
“He’s much less of a liability now than he was on Memorial Day,” said Christopher Nicholas, a Harrisburg-based GOP strategist.
Still, Democrats weren’t rushing to embrace Biden, whose disapproval ratings are still poor, about 10 percentage points higher than his approval marks, according to polling averages by the data-focused website FiveThirtyEight.
Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic Senate nominee, notably didn’t make the trip to Wilkes-Barre on Tuesday, despite supporting the gun law Biden was promoting. Aides said he had a previously scheduled event elsewhere that day. Instead, Fetterman said he’d see the president at the Pittsburgh Labor Day parade Monday — and, tellingly, emphasized one of their few significant points of disagreement.
“It’s long past time that we finally decriminalize marijuana,” Fetterman said in a statement about Biden’s Monday visit.
Meanwhile, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee for governor, has largely emphasized state-level issues such as public safety, education, abortion, and voting rights. He attended the Wilkes-Barre event Tuesday — as attorney general, the event focused on gun violence fit into his job, aides said — but his campaign offered a muted statement about Biden’s Pittsburgh stop.
“Attorney General Shapiro will be in Pittsburgh marching with the hardworking men and women of labor on Monday,” campaign spokesperson Manuel Bonder said. “As always, we welcome President Biden back to his home state of Pennsylvania.”
Biden’s event Thursday in Philadelphia will even more directly plunge him into the political fray. His planned prime-time speech in front of Independence Hall about threats to democracy is likely to replay his long-running warnings about Trump and his GOP allies.
In doing so, Biden will be aiming to frame the midterms not just as a referendum on his administration but as a choice between Democrats and a GOP that has widely embraced election conspiracies, particularly in Pennsylvania.
“Part of Democrats trying to make this more of a ‘choice’ election as opposed to a referendum is reminding some people, particularly in the suburbs, of what they don’t like about Trump,” Kondik said.
The sitting president would typically be the main focus of any midterm election. But even two years out of office, Trump still looms over the country’s politics.
The former president has kept dominating headlines, most recently due to the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, where federal agents reportedly recovered hundreds of classified documents. One of the most consequential policy shifts in decades, the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade’s protections for abortion access, bore Trump’s imprint through his appointments to the high court.
And he has relished his continued influence over the GOP, helping defeat Republican critics and elevate his own allies in a number of primaries across the country — including in Pennsylvania, where his endorsement of Oz was likely a crucial factor in a primary Oz won by fewer than 1,000 votes.
“Is there any other president in decades who has remained on the political scene in such a large way?” Balaban asked.
Yet the general election is a different test than the primary, and Republicans have mixed feelings about Trump’s influence. He can still rally supporters — and Oz, in particular, needs to solidify his standing with the GOP base — but Trump also inspires Democrats and many independents who recoiled from his presidency. The more he consumes attention, the harder it might be for Republicans to keep the focus on Biden.
Trump’s rally Saturday will be his first public event since the FBI searched his home, setting the stage for more fodder for a story that has kept the former president in the headlines.
Mastriano is short on money, so a prime-time rally with Trump could help. With polls showing Oz lagging Fetterman, he may also need the former president’s help.
And if there’s one area where Trump’s support might be most powerful, it could be northeastern Pennsylvania.
With a population of fewer than 41,000, Wilkes-Barre might seem like an unusual place for so much heavyweight attention. Yet the city in Luzerne County has symbolic and political heft for both Biden and Trump.
Luzerne County is emblematic of the political shifts in northeastern Pennsylvania that helped Trump become president in 2016, from which Democrats have been trying to recover ever since. It’s part of a region with a long history of culturally conservative, union-friendly Democrats, one that swung sharply from Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, reshaping Pennsylvania’s presidential politics.
While Trump lagged behind other Republicans in some parts of the state in 2020, he proved far more popular in northeastern Pennsylvania, winning close to 57% of the vote in Luzerne County.
But the region means a lot to Biden, too: Scranton, in neighboring Lackawanna County, is his childhood home. While still losing Luzerne in 2020, Biden improved the Democratic edge in Lackawanna. Scranton and Wilkes-Barre share the same media market, and the region is hosting a number of competitive federal and state races this fall.
“Twenty years ago, Republicans would not have put on their dance card, ‘Let’s go to Wilkes-Barre,’” Nicholas said. “If you were going to [northeastern Pennsylvania] at all, you were going to a more rural area.”
In many ways, it’s the mirror image of the Philadelphia suburbs, which shifted away from the GOP and were key to Biden’s 2020 win.
Even after the current and former presidents leave, it’ll be a place to watch in November.
